Sevyanaa Stories: Hundred Miles to Hell
by Cyber 14
Summary: Rookie Shadow Front Detective Kyle Heywood is aching to prove himself. But when he finally gets his chance, it turns out to be much more then he ever bargined for.


Opening: The planet of Sevyanaa, local Shadow Front operative Kyle Heywood investigates local murder on behest of police

A detective story from me, taking many cues from David Fincher's excellent movie Se7en. It's not a true adaptation, but it was definitely inspired by the film.

Rated teen for grisly images and some violence.

Note: the Shadow Front, the Caltani 83rd Special Projects Division, the planet Sevyanaa, and any named weapons (I.E. the Stallion Stalker) are my own creations and are (unfortunately) in no way endorsed or approved by Games Workshop.

Glossary

Logic Hub: a computer, more or less the same as today's computers.

Dataslate: a handheld electronic data-storage device, similar to a PDA.

Hab Block: an apartment building.

Stubpistol: basically a modern conventional handgun, either a revolver or a semi-auto.

Autopistol: basically a modern machine pistol, although able to be fired one handed by well trained users. Used as sidearms by some officers and civilians.

Hand Vox: a cell phone.

………………………………………………………..

It was raining again.

It always seemed to rain here, thought detective Kyle Heywood, as he gazed out the window at the gale. It came in never ending sheets, as though the planet was actually trying to drown its inhabitants with a never-ending torrent of moisture. Kyle sighed and looked around his office. It was large, dim, and cramped. A desk was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. It was strewn with papers and dataslates detailing dull police procedure and never-ending forms, as well as profiles of witnesses and various other bits of junk. A bulky logic hub sat on a corner of the desk, the screen glowing softly. Long rows of filing cabinets ran along the walls and a large standing gun case sat in one corner. The case contained a large cache of weapons, Kyle's personal armory.

Kyle belonged to the Shadow Front, an Imperium-spanning spying network run out of the planet Necromunda. This network worked with local military and law enforcement units on a vast number of different assignments, from intelligence gathering to wetworks operations to military reconnaissance and sabotage. Kyle was one of several operatives stationed on this planet after the civil war that had racked the planet several years previously. It had left hundreds of thousands dead and gone on for three years. After it had ended, the Shadow Front had stationed several of its members here as a precaution. The planet was a rich weapons manufacturing site and needed to be defended. As it stood, Kyle was the youngest operative stationed on this planet, and had ended up with this uneventful, rainy city as his jurisdiction, given to him because he "knew the area". Nevertheless, he was eager to prove himself, as he had just joined the Shadow front after leaving the local police precinct in Aldwynch city. He was hoping for more of a challenge in his new job; but after being shipped off to Necromunda for training, he was so far doing the exact same things he had been doing back at his old precinct, with the exception of working under a different employer.

He sighed, got up from his chair, and walked over to the gun case. He opened it up and perused the racks inside. There was a small assortment of handguns, shotguns, sub-machineguns, and assault rifles, both las and hard round, stacked in neat rows along the inside. Kyle reached in and pulled one out. It was a Zodiac Tactical Arms model 7, a locally produced clone of the venerable Stallion M008 Stalker, a small and thin .45 caliber solid ammunition pistol popular with law enforcement. He carried it over to his desk, along with cleaning materials, and sat down.

He removed the magazine, and checking that there was no chambered round, decocked the hammer. He then removed the slide and proceeded to clean it, lubricating the slide, cleaning the barrel, and dusting off the frame for good measure. He was just finishing up when his hand vox chimed. It was the local law enforcement delivering a call-up message. Ten minutes later, Kyle was picked up in an armored police van and taken to the crime scene.

………………………………………………………

"I'm sorry to call you on such short notice." Said a local police sergeant, a man so fat that it appeared that he could just as easily roll along, like a bowling ball, instead of walk, as they drove in a police van to a building in the heart of the city, "But you were our easiest available detective. All of our police detectives are involved on other cases, believe it or not. Hard time for us."

"Hey" Kyle joked, "I was having such a fun time watching the paint chip off my office walls. Now I'm gonna miss it, all because of you." He put on a mock-dejected manner.

The sergeant laughed "Sorry, but you're the only guy we could track down. Oh, we're here."

He was right, they had arrived at a run down hab block, a tenement building that looked as if only the grime caking its dirty, graffiti stained walls kept it from collapsing from sheer neglect.

They exited the van and proceeded through the rusty front doors into the building. They climbed the crumbling stairs to the fifth floor and entered a storage room. Kyle could see immediately what they were here for.

A man was slumped in a chair in the center of the room. He was wearing the uniform of a building custodian. He looked undernourished and had a terrified look on his thin, pale face. Kyle could see immediately that he was dead. The word FEAR was scrawled in marker on the wall behind him.

"Whoo, what do we have here" Kyle intoned.

Kyle spent the next hour examining the scene. The coroners had carted the body away soon after they had arrived. After an hour, Kyle and the forensics team had found absolutely nothing, no prints, no DNA, no clues anywhere. He sighed in disappointment. Either this was the most organized killer in all of recorded history, or someone had accidentally destroyed a clue.

"_Maybe the coroners'll discover something"_, he thought, as he left the crime scene later that day.

The coroners did. The next day, Kyle was brought in to examine the autopsy of the corpse. They had discovered injection abrasions on his arms, and traces of a mysterious chemical in his blood. Chemical analysis subsequently found it to be a hallucinogen that induced intense fear. The man had died from a heart attack, literally scared to death. Kyle spent the next six hours going over this information, writing up a case report, and examining the situation from every angle. Why would someone do this? It couldn't just be a spur of the moment murder. It had seemed too planned, to involved, to be the work of a simple sadistic spree killer. The murderer must have had an agenda, obviously wanted to show the detectives something. But what was it. "_Fear_" Kyle turned this word over and over in his head, but couldn't make anything out of it. To make matters worse, the next morning, he got another call. A similar murder had happened on the edge of town.

The murder had occurred in a derelict building on the edge of the city. The building was literally falling apart. When a team was sent in to respond to a call from a neighboring building about a crash and a scream, one of the response unit members had fallen through the rotten floorboards three stories to a concrete floor, badly breaking both legs. Thankfully, the team had laid out scaffolding for Kyle and the forensics team when they arrived, as a precaution against future accidents.

The crime scene was of a man, lying dead on a concrete floor amidst the wreckage of a broken chair. There were holes on the ceiling for four floors above him, meaning that he had fallen through all of them on his way to the ground. On the fourth floor, written in red paint on the rotten floorboards, was the word DECAY.

"Gentlemen, we have ourselves a serial killer." Kyle said, to the room at large. Several members of the forensics team, who were scouring the area for clues, nodded their agreement.

For the next few hours, they turned up next to nothing, until one of the forensics team found fingerprints on one of the chair legs. They belonged to a known drug dealer. Kyle decided that it was time to pay the man a visit.

Two hours later, Kyle was standing with the Special Tactics squad outside the apartment where the suspect lived. As they went in, the team leading the way, they received frightened and apprehensive stares from the local occupants. Obviously, they had never witnessed force of this magnitude invade their building before. As the team moved through the structure, they covered each other with a precision and professionalism that Kyle rarely had seen outside of the guard. These people were pros.

They readied outside the suspect's door. One of the men brought a battering ram foreword and smashed in the door like matchwood, and the team stormed inside. Shouts of "clear" could be heard from inside as Kyle waited to make sure the scene was safe. He could defend himself, but the team thought it best that they handle this by themselves. Suddenly, one of the men yelled out into the hallway. "Detective, you might want to come and take a look at this!"

Kyle rushed inside. He was immediately shown to the scene. He was directed to the filthiest kitchen he had ever been in. Mold and grime caked the walls, filthy dishes covered in moldy and rotting food were stacked in the sink, and garbage was everywhere. As he entered the kitchen, roaches scattering at his feet, Kyle could see the form of a man, tied to a metal chair that had been bolted to the floor. His arms and legs were bound and he was gagged. He was grotesquely thin and looked extremely undernourished. He was obviously dead. The word FAMINE was written in what appeared to be grease above his head. "Whoa, great." Kyle sighed to no one in particular as he took in the grisly scene. "Sergeant, you and your men can go. Don't touch anything. I'll be busy here for a while. Send forensics in here, will ya."

"Alright" replied the team leader. The man gestured to his team and he and his men walked from the room.

They were definitely dealing with a serial killer, Kyle was sure of it. But it wasn't _this_ man. He was missing his right hand, which explained how his prints could have been found at the site. He examined the scene for ten minutes, wondering where the forensics team was. He then began to notice a pattern. All of the murders were accompanied by a word: Fear, Decay, and Famine. These words, coincidentally or not, were the codenames for the different branches of the elite Imperial Guard taskforce known as the Caltani 83rd Special Projects Division. "Fear" was the main body of the regiment, which conducted most of the operations undertaken by the taskforce. "Decay" specialized in communications disruption, "War" specialized in vehicular combat and insertion/extraction, and "Famine" specialized in resource sapping. Together, they undertook covert missions Imperium-wide. The only word left was "War". Kyle's cousin Eric served with the War taskforce, and had fought here during the Sevyanian civil war, and it had been he who had given Kyle his Zodiac 7 handgun upon joining the Shadow Front. He pondered this revelation for several minutes and, coming up with nothing substantial, went back to examining the crime scene. After five more minutes, he walked out into the hallway, wondering where forensics could be. He saw a figure at the end of the hall, too far to make out a face. "Sorry buddy," he called, "Crime scene, no entry."

The man seemed to contemplate this for a second, and then shots rang out, burying themselves in the wall around the detective.

"Freeze!" Kyle yelled, pulling out his sidearm, the same Zodiac 7 he had cleaned just the other day. He ran after the man, who had fled into a nearby apartment. Approaching the doorway, Kyle raised his weapon. "Come out with your hands up. Come out now!" he yelled. As Kyle rounded the doorframe, he saw that a window was open. He ran to it, only to duck back in seconds later as more shots flew his way. Kyle glanced over the lip of the window as the suspect ducked through another window three stories below. Kyle ran back out into the hallway and down the stairs for three floors. He kicked open a door, ignoring the frightened yells of the occupants. He ran through the apartment and climbed through a bathroom window out onto the roof. He ran across the metal roof and ducked through the same window and entered an unused apartment, chasing after the suspect. The man seemed surprised to see him respond so quickly. He ducked through a door into the hall. Kyle just reached it in time to see him run up the stairs. Kyle gave chase, following the man up the stairs. The man ran up to the top floor, through another door, and onto a fire escape, Kyle chasing him all the way. Bullets pinged off of the metal grate as Kyle clambered out onto it. Kyle lost sight of the man as he clambered down the fire escape. He just seemed to disappear. Kyle eased himself onto the scaffolding, meaning to make his way to the alley and reengage the man. Suddenly, the scaffolding gave way, sending Kyle crashing onto the hood of a stationary truck, sending his arm through the windshield, and cutting a deep gash in it. He rolled off the hood and slammed hard into the concrete. Suddenly, the suspect was standing over him, his gun raised. He was wearing a trench coat, hat, and a facemask. But, the one thing that would imprint itself in Kyle's mind later, the one useless piece of information that seared itself irrevocably into his brain was that the gun pointed at him was an Edelweiss Arms Spec7 autopistol.

Kyle knew that this was it. He was wounded, and he had lost his pistol in the fall. He was dead.

"No…" he managed to gasp out. A feeble word, one that he was sure would be his last.

But then, beyond all reason, the man lowered his gun, and disappeared down the alley. Kyle made to give chase, but by the time he had located his gun and ran down the alley, the man had disappeared into the rain-drenched street.


End file.
